3D chip stacking to take Moore’s Law past 2020

March 12, 2010

By combining 3D-stack-architecture of multiple cores with hair-thin, liquid-cooled microchannels, IBM and Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich hope to extend Moore’s law for another decade or more.

3D chip stacks with interlayer cooling overcome the bandwidth bottleneck between core and cache memory and allow for systems with a much higher efficiency, so supercomputers won’t consume too much energy to be affordable.

To solve the cooling challenge, the team is developing Aquasar, a first-of-a-kind, water-cooled supercomputer. The team plans to design microchannels with single-phase liquid and two-phase cooling systems using nano-surfaces that pipe coolants within a few millimeters of the chip to absorb the heat.